Has there been a more popular Nobel laureate in recent memory? The Oct. 10 announcement of Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was met not by respectful applause or a modest uptick in patriotic pride among her compatriots, but by expressions of outright joy, sometimes to the speaker’s own surprise. One Internet commentator summed up his feelings in a phrase at once absurd, inevitable and exquisitely apt: “A good day, a day like beating the Russians at hockey.” Yes, indeed: That is how much Alice Munro matters to Canadians.

Adding to our pleasure was the evident truth we weren’t alone in our regard. Helped along by the fact that the Anglo world hasn’t had a laureate to celebrate since Doris Lessing in 2007—not to mention a run of recent winners little-known in English translation—American and British praise was scarcely less effusive. Novelist A.S. Byatt declared the announcement “has made me happiest in the whole of my life.” The rest of the world seemed to approve, as well, which speaks volumes about the clarity of Munro’s prose and the quality of her translators. In Paris, the newspaper Le Monde, in an admiring tribute entitled “La reine de la nouvelle,” echoed the famous refrain—“Read Munro! Read Munro!”—of American writer Jonathan Franzen’s 2004 New York Times review of her Runaway—“Oui, Franzen a raison. Il faut lire Alice Munro.”

Even the very few naysayers the media managed to turn up only seemed to add to the general approbation. Various newspapers pointed to Christian Lorentzen, an editor at the London Review of Books, and his unflattering review in June of Dear Life, but then confused the issue by quoting from a section where Lorentzen summed up the views of Munro fans, making him sound bizarrely like a cheerleader: “Over a career now in its sixth decade, she’s rehearsed the same themes again and again, but that’s because she’s a master of variation. She has preternatural powers of sympathy and empathy, but she’s never sentimental.” Franzen could hardly have said it better. Otherwise, the search for contrarians pulled up only Bret Easton Ellis, and when your most prominent critic is recognized primarily as the author of American Psycho (1991), you are by definition doing good work.

Yet, running through the happiness was a current of surprise, even—among writers, at least—of relief. The Nobel has not chosen a writer best known for short fiction since Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978, and the prolific American author also had 18 novels to his credit. At 82, Munro has none. What she has is the adulation of her fellows. Aamer Hussein, the prominent Pakistani short-fiction author who is also a literature professor at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, credited Munro with being the single individual who, “more than anyone in the Western world, has kept the short story alive as a vibrant, developing form.” Peter Englund, the Swedish academy’s permanent secretary, perhaps reflecting on recent Nobel history, sounded almost impressed with his selection committee’s audacity when he made the announcement. “She has taken an art form which has tended to come a little bit in the shadow behind the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection.”

And so she has, in subtle, supple prose that Tracy Ware, an English professor at Queen’s University, who has taught Munro for 30 years, says “matches anyone’s.” She was born in 1931 in tiny Wingham, Ont. (Depression-era population 3,000), the child of a failing fox farmer and a former schoolteacher mother who would die young of Parkinson’s. A bright girl, she won a small scholarship that—combined with various part-time jobs and selling her blood—kept her going at the University of Western Ontario in London for two years. Munro then dropped out, partly from lack of money and partly to marry. Alice and her husband, Jim Munro, moved to Vancouver (later Victoria) and opened a bookstore while raising three daughters. When the marriage ended, Alice moved back home to Ontario, eventually settling with her second husband, Gerry Fremlin, in Clinton, a bare 30 km from Wingham. Through it all, Munro wrote and wrote.

Her settings and her primarily female characters, Margaret Atwood once noted, may come almost exclusively from her original and new home, which painter Greg Curnoe of London Ont., called Sowesto, more conventionally known as Southwestern Ontario. But that region is a place of “considerable psychic murkiness and oddity,” according to Atwood, a long-time Munro friend and fellow CanLit icon. It’s home not just to Munro, but to John Kenneth Galbraith (who, famously, dismissed it as “devoid of topographic, ethnic or historical interest”), Robertson Davies, the Donnelly massacre and, more important, to the still-judgmental offspring of rigid Calvinists, the sort of people who, during Munro’s youth in the 1930s and ’40s, disapproved of sex, for fear it might lead to dancing.

What lies within stories set in that seemingly bland and respectable society, Atwood continues, are: “lush nature, repressed emotions, respectable fronts, hidden sexual excesses, outbreaks of violence, lurid crimes, long-held grudges, strange rumours.” And although Munro’s four-decade-long relationship with TheNew Yorkernow appears like a magical love affair, the magazine’s legendary editor-in-chief William Shawn was troubled at first, says his fiction editor Chip McGrath, at finding such “roughness, not so much in the language, as the emotional violence in writing of such quality.” Shawn insisted on the removal of some “toilet noises” from “Royal Beatings,” the first Munro story to run in The New Yorker, but he was sufficiently impressed to allow an “arsehole” into his hallowed pages, and quickly became, McGrath adds, one of the writer’s chief admirers.

The tales, however rough their contents, are told with the “preternatural” sympathy and utter lack of sentimentality that Lorentzen so unwittingly pointed to. “Ruthless is too strong a word,” allows Robert Thacker, an American professor of Canadian Studies and English at New York’s St. Lawrence University and author of the biography Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, in an interview, “but she has the steel.” (And not just in artistic vision: “Her daughters told me they knew when she was far into writing, because she was always somewhere else, even when she was right in front of you, making dinner.”)

The quintessential Munro protagonist is moved seamlessly through time by her creator; she is often looking at Sowesto and the past with fresh eyes, having returned from somewhere else; she knows she is not guiltless in whatever has transpired, that the pursuit of her dreams (or self-interest—the reader can choose) is not bruise-free for others in her life. She’s stifled, burdened with work and kids, in the midst of a breakup—“themes that come up again and again, but in different forms,” says McGrath, “so you’d be crazy to read them as autobiography.”

As slippery as memory is Munro’s creative process. She once spoke about how “the complexity of things—the things within things—just seems to be endless.’’ Perhaps that’s why the shape of the stories is so protean. Munro was always slow to sign her work, and never put her name on a manuscript until she felt ready to mail it off. In 1960, she sent what would become, eight years later, the title story of her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, to the now defunct Montrealer magazine unsigned—an indication, biographer Thacker suggests, that she was ambivalent about it. The Montrealer editor who found it, the sole diamond in a foot-high slush pile, ended up sending letters to American advice-for-writers magazines to find the author. Vancouver poet Elizabeth Gourlay, who had heard the story on CBC Radio, saw one of the reprinted letters and informed Munro.

Munro apparently believes her stories, even when satisfactory enough to submit to editors, even when fully approved by those editors, are never really set in stone. Thacker points to several that have different endings in Canadian and American editions, the work of an inveterate reviser. Ware, for one, is only half-joking when he worries that Munro may some day go back and rewrite everything: “At some point, you hope she’ll let the historical record stand.”

“You don’t want to give her too much of a chance at revision,” exclaims her agent and close friend Ginger Barber over the phone from her home in Virginia. “Don’t print that. Oh, go ahead, she’ll hear me laughing.”

Doug Gibson, Munro’s long-time Canadian publisher, relates in his book Stories About Storytellers how Munro wanted to make major changes to Who Do You Think You Are?(1978)—including moving from the first person to the third and adding a new story—when the manuscript was already at the printers. Author, publisher and printer managed to pull it off, but Gibson made Munro pay a financial penalty for the expense incurred—as a kindness, he slyly implies—because, as someone of the same background as the Scots Presbyterians she writes about, “Alice expected nothing less.” As with her characters, to step out of line means a price has to be paid, always.

The changes, though, represent more than a perfectionist’s quirks; as much as anything, they foster the awe in which Munro is held by other writers. “Changing from first to third person?” says Ware. “After the story has already been good enough to appear in The New Yorker? That astonishes writers, who think you need the voice first before you can do anything.”

Munro, crucially, accomplished all this within a national literary culture that validates short stories perhaps more than any other English-language society. Speaking of his fellow Canadian publishers, Gibson notes that “our colleagues in London and New York would gaze in wonder at our short-story collections’ sales and ask how that happened. They were very dubious of the commercial potential in their own markets. I think it was our good fortune to have had such extraordinary practitioners. We’d say that the Canadian public was used to getting really good stories from really good writers.” To a very large extent, that’s the one-woman founder effect of Alice Munro, who demonstrated, by her critical and commercial success, the reach and possibilities of her genre. (In two decades, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s richest and most prestigious, has been won by short-story collections just three times—two were by Alice Munro.)

But it’s also a matter of the twists of CanLit history. What, after all, nurtured Munro in the days before she paved a path for others? There were outlets for short fiction, in English Canada’s nascent literary world during Munro’s youth, that didn’t necessarily exist for novels. There were magazines like Chatelaine (for anything that could be construed as “women’s writing”) and Robert Weaver’s Tamarack Review (which Munro recalled years later as “a brave little magazine”) and, above all, there was Weaver’s CBC Radio show, Anthology, the program that broadcast her story “The Dance of the Happy Shades.” Looking at the situation “from a starving artist’s perspective,” Gibson concurs with the advantages of stories then: “a little work, for a little money that would come much faster than an uncertain bigger payoff further down the line for more work.”

It’s impossible to exaggerate the importance of Weaver in mid-20th century CanLit, according to scholars who have studied it. “He has this ill-defined mandate from the CBC”, Thacker relates, with only slight exaggeration, “and he decided to use it to create a national literature.” He was a lifeline for writers scattered across the country, not least to Munro, who was in contact with him early. One of her letters to Weaver notes she is now named Munro, meaning she was talking about a story she had sent before her wedding at age 20 in 1951, while she was still Alice Laidlaw.

Yet, even while she was taking what advantage she could from the limited but real openings for short fiction, Munro kept trying to write a novel. “There’s one from the ’50s in her papers at the University of Calgary,” says Thacker. “It’s called ‘Red Fox,’ and it’s really an extended short story. You can see her struggle—short story was just the way her imagination worked.” But the pressure for a novel was inescapable, the only foreseeable route, not just to any faint hope of making a living as an author, but to what Munro really wanted: recognition as a serious writer. It was what everyone in the book trade—critics, her eventual agent Ginger Barber, publishers and the writer herself—wanted and expected from her. Munro’s second book, the linked short stories of Lives of Girls and Women(1971), was marketed, wrongly, as a novel, a decision everyone involves now admits was a mistake. A crisis point, both personal and artistic, was rapidly approaching.

Munro stories start with an idea, usually an image, something that makes their creator want to know “the rest of the story,” the before and after. In the arc of her own life, from Wingham to Stockholm, 1973 to 1977 is the hinge moment.

“There is no other time in her life to match it,” says Thacker, for its subsequent influence. Munro returned to Sowesto, an accomplished artist looking with fresh eyes at old ground, old social situations, old memories. At the same time as her aesthetic vision was changing and gaining in power, her marriage had crumbled. She was looking for ways to support her children. She was certain she would need a day job: a daunting prospect in itself, since, until her divorce, she had never owned a chequebook. And she still hadn’t the recognition she sought. The weight of the novel demand was heavier than ever. For reasons practical and aesthetic, Alice Munro was struggling with her natural artistic abilities and instincts.

Then new people, bearing new possibilities, came into her life. Everyone in the Canadian book trade knew about her situation. Gibson, then working for Macmillan, hopped a bus to London—“that will tell you about the financial resources of Canadian publishing in 1976,” he dryly adds—to meet Munro. “I told her conventional wisdom was all wrong. If she wanted to write short stories, I wanted to publish them. I told her, ‘I’ll never ask you for a novel.’ ” It was an offer of support Munro repaid, with interest, when she followed Gibson from Macmillan to his new position at McClelland and Stewart in 1986.

Two Americans played pivotal roles. Barber—only recently become an agent after some years as a professor of literature, and in the process of shifting her new focus from theatre to fiction—asked her good friend Phoebe Larmore, Atwood’s agent, if she knew of any promising writers needing representation. At the same time, Munro was seeking agent advice from Atwood—not as a celebrated writer, but as the canny businesswoman who was among the first Canadian authors to grasp the importance of agents and what would now be called brand protection. The two women met, Munro gave Barber a few stories and Barber called The New Yorker’s new fiction editor.

“She invited me to lunch,” Chip McGrath recalls. “I probably wouldn’t have gone any other time, but I was new and I was hungry for new writers.” Barber gave him a bag of six or eight Munro stories—no one any longer remembers exactly how many. McGrath didn’t have high expectations. “I remember thinking, ‘Great, a new Canadian writer, just what we need.’ Then I read them.” McGrath accepted two of them right off the bat—“unheard-of for a new writer,” says Barber—the first of nearly 60 more that have indelibly linked author and magazine ever since.

McGrath knows a lot, “sometimes more than I want,” he says, about the personal lives of most of the writers he has dealt with over his career. That’s emphatically not the case with the private Munro. (McGrath describes an encounter between her and the equally reticent Shawn as “shy versus shy.”) So it was only in retrospect, he says now, “that I understood what a vital time this was in Alice’s life. She wasn’t a complete unknown, but her books were going nowhere in the United States and Ginger had been frank that, if she, Alice, was going to restart her career here, she needed a novel. And Alice had tried and tried. If she had pulled it off, she would presumably be a lot richer, but the short story would be so much poorer.”

Instead, a confluence of events, people, deepening artistic power and a certain Sowesto stubbornness, moved the story of Alice Munro in another direction. The new situation brought her fame and stability, both financial and personal. It let Alice Munro become Alice Munro. It wouldn’t be an Alice Munro story if what followed were a straight line to a glittering ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10—there were decades of nonpareil stories to come first. But the path had been cleared, the route opened to what McGrath calls “win, win, win: for her, for Canada, for the short story.” A good day, all right, better even than beating the Russians.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/alice-munro-never-too-much-happiness/feed/0Douglas Coupland: God of small thingshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/the-god-of-small-things-2/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/the-god-of-small-things-2/#commentsFri, 11 Oct 2013 01:00:00 +0000Ken MacQueenhttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=430361With a new book and his first survey show in the offing, a peek into the author/artist/designer's world

We are sitting in a temporary studio space on Vancouver’s North Shore looking at a brain. Well, part of a brain; part of Douglas Coupland’s very busy brain. Or at least how he imagines it. It would be the part of the brain that collects things, which he does rather compulsively, never quite knowing, sometimes until years later, the utility of, say, the toy soldier, or horseshoe magnet or piece of plastic poo he has gathered.

These thousands of things—part of 165 boxfuls he keeps in storage containers—are arrayed on the studio floor, starting with a row of old Penguin paperbacks by our feet and ending 10 m later with a collection of dartboards on the end wall. It’s a brain as represented by a very neat flea market—yard-sale things that fire his synapses, spur his imagination or simply give him pleasure. It’s hard to know if it’s the part of the Coupland brain that inspired some 23 books, or the part that designs furniture, clothing and outdoor spaces, or the part that fires the visual artist whose works range from whimsical pop to biting social commentary, to the four outsized bronze statues at Vancouver’s B.C. Place that magnificently capture the spirit of the late Terry Fox—one of Coupland’s heroes.

One assumes this stuff, and much more, nourishes all of Coupland’s endeavours—and currently the 51-year-old is on quite a tear. He has just released his 14th novel, Worst. Person. Ever. And he is at work on a solo exhibition of his visual work that will take up the entire ground floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery for three months, starting May 31. “The Brain,” or at least the sample that is spread here on the floor, is part of his attempt at “assessing the early 21st-century condition,” as Daina Augaitis, the museum’s chief curator and associate director, puts it. “That’s a pretty broad thing,” she concedes.

The dismal state of the century looms large in Coupland’s very sweary new book. It is the rudest thing he has published, crude enough to have a warning on the dust jacket: “This novel contains much talk of bodily functions, improbable sexual content, violent death, nuclear crisis and elaborately inventive profanity: viewer discretion is advised.” Actually, it’s more of a dare than a warning. Coupland himself calls it “a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming value.”

It involves the misdeeds of one Raymond Gunt, a freelance television cameraman living a hard-luck existence in the London suburb of East Acton—a man whose accounts, both financial and karmic, are in desperate arrears. If Gunt has a gift, other than talent for self-sabotage, it’s his ability to string together toxic trainloads of profanity, links of insult so vile that to quote an example here would have you, dear reader, marching on Maclean’s headquarters with torch and pitchfork.

Gunt is coerced by his ex-wife, Fiona—a successful casting director and “an atomic bomb of pain,” in one of Gunt’s kinder assessments—into taking a job as a B-unit cameraman for an American network shooting a Survivor-style TV series on a South Pacific Island. “I don’t like having you in the same city as me,” she explains. Gunt, having no friends, recruits as an assistant a homeless man, Neal, “a verminous, panhandling dole-rat.” Chaos ensues, for Coupland has chosen two target-rich environments: American culture in general and reality shows in particular. You will look in vain for deep meaning, moralizing or lofty purpose, but there is black humour in abundance. “I think I said somewhere that it not only has no redeeming value, it might actually be bad for you,” he says.

As to why he would write such a book, he blames the angst of the post-9/11, post-recession era. The shelves are overfull of worthy, earnest, seriously correct books. “There’s just such a priggishness out there about everything these days. I’m kind of sick of that. The Americans have turned it into a national art form,” he says. “I just wanted an antidote to the spirit of the age.”

It was great fun to write when the words were flowing, he says. He’d sometimes look up from his labours, amazed at the profanity he’d typed. “Technically I said that,” he says. “But is Agatha Christie an axe murderer? No. Am I Raymond? No. But it’s kind of weird what came out.”

It’s a bit of a paradox: Coupland mercilessly skewers the cynical fakery of the reality show concept in the book while admitting to being a huge fan of Survivor. “Oh, the things it reveals about human nature and how incredibly political life is,” he says. “How one micro-political decision can tank everything.”

The book, and to an extent his forthcoming gallery exhibition, reflect concerns about the perceived decay of American society. “[It worked much better when there were a few million of us instead of 350 million,” says Sarah, an American character in the book. “There’s not much left to consume. In 15 years we turn into India. We’re a catastrophe in the making.”

As we’re speaking, the U.S. government is in shutdown due to a Republican-led revolt on health care reforms. It stopped the work and pay of 800,000 public servants, suspended medical research, security and intelligence analysis, and closed national parks and facilities. “I used to think I understood that country,” says Coupland. “Now they’re determined to chop off all their feet and all their hands. Northing short of total destruction will make them happy.” Is he worried Americans will find the novel offensive? “I don’t have to answer to anybody, so let ’em,” he says. “It’s just a nation of sourpusses,” he says. “Censorious, busybody sourpusses.”

Coupland has never lacked for opinions, but his outlets for expression have expanded to embrace his art school and design roots. He exploded into public consciousness in 1991 as the young hipster who defined a generation with his international bestseller, Generation X: Tales For an Accelerated Culture. Some 22 years later, bearded and greying, he more physically resembles a semifinalist in an Ernest Hemingway look-alike contest. He’s shed what he calls his “protective coating of youthful cluelessness.” Simultaneously, he loosened the reins on his manic creativity, allowing it to ride off in all directions. Books, he says, “are just one aspect of my life now.”

It was his visual output that caused the Vancouver Art Gallery to come calling. “He’s been working very prolifically over the last 12 years, I would say, and has produced a huge body of work,” says Augaitis, the curator. “There’s enough work now to assess it, find a narrative through it, and present it to a larger public.” Enough work that it will take some serious culling to squeeze it into the main floor. As for finding a narrative focus, when the exhibition title is Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything, well, that will be a challenge.

The work fits into five loose thematic sections. It starts with a reflection on Canada and nationhood. Lego is involved, a favourite of Coupland’s. Back in May he advertised for a “Lego gatherer” to assist in acquiring just the right shape and colour of blocks. He now has 250,000 pieces on order, which, through an interactive public process, will fill a gallery room with 144 free-form towers. “I know what it looks like,” he says with confidence. “I just don’t know what it looks like.”

There’s a section on “words into objects,” which will include wasp nests Coupland crafted by masticating the pages of his own books, and some 100 hand-painted slogans (sample: “Poverty with no Internet would be truly dreadful”). There’s an homage to pop-art heroes like Roy Lichtenstein, then works inspired by politics and the impact of 9/11. It ends with “The Brain.” Says Augaitis: “It will give us some insights into how Doug’s brain functions.”

That remains a work in progress. Coupland points to the left of the studio to a collection of vividly coloured plastic bottles that once held cleaning products. He’d gathered them on a trip to Tokyo in 2000, because that’s what a collector does. Now, look, he says, as he walks to a cardboard box across the room. It’s full of weather-beaten flotsam—debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami he gathered this summer on the east coast of Haida Gwaii. He grabs a turquoise plastic bottle, dented but otherwise identical to some in his collection. “All of the products I went to Toyko to get have now floated to British Columbia,” he says with a tinge of awe. “It’s candy-coloured and it looks so happy, but it’s all about death and environmental degradation.”

There’s whimsy in all he collects, but often a darker element, too. Plastic waste also bobs to the surface in his latest book, when a rogue element uses a nuclear warhead to bust up the vast real-life mat of floating ocean garbage known as the Pacific Trash Vortex.

And there it is, the artistic brain explained. “If you collect something,” he says, “it will eventually be revealed why.”

Ross King, 50, may have a Ph.D. in English literature, a couple of novels and six critically acclaimed books on art history to his credit, including Leonardo and the Last Supper, nominated for the Charles Taylor prize. But as a boy growing up in Saskatchewan, what King really wanted to be was a political cartoonist. A certain Prairie realism—“I had no ability to draw or paint,” he says—sent him to university for 14 years. Next, unable to find an academic job, he tried his hand at historical novels. They did “well enough,” says King, who has lived in Britain since 1992, but he still wanted to write about actual history, particularly art history. “What I took away from novels were the basics of writing them—plot, character, action, atmosphere. I wanted to put all that into books that read like novels except that everything was true.”

King may not be able to draw, but craft well-researched, beautifully written, novel-like illuminations of key moments in the history of Western art? That he can do like few others. Since 2003, three of King’s books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, with two of them winning it, including Leonardo.

The story of Leonardo da Vinci and the painting—whose only rival for the title of the world’s most famous is his own Mona Lisa—was a natural for King. There’s an epic arc to it, with Leonardo ingeniously inventing ways around the limitations of fresco and his own inexperience in the medium, ways that succeeded brilliantly at the time but carried the seeds of their own destruction—the painting has been deteriorating ever since it was finished some 500 years ago. More compelling for the character-driven author, though, is the fact that “Leonardo is probably my most interesting case study. I’m always trying to show the human side of the artists, and for Leonardo there’s a lot of material. We have his grocery lists: he was a vegetarian but he used to buy eels and make an eel and apricot dish as a delicacy for his apprentices. So he put eels on the table in The Last Supper.”

We also know much about Leonardo’s sexuality and what that means for the widespread—“half the people at my readings,” says King—Da Vinci Code-inspired belief that the beardless figure beside Jesus in The Last Supper is actually Mary Magdalene and not the Apostle John. “Sexual identity is always a social construct, and the 15th century had radically different ideas about it than our time,” notes King. “But Leonardo, given the absence of women in his life, was by current standards a gay man” who liked to surround himself with beautiful young men, including the one King believes was the model for John. That would be Salai, who first entered Leonardo’s life as a troublesome errand boy before quite possibly becoming his lover, destined to be immortalized in one of Western art’s greatest masterpieces.

EXCERPT

Leonardo took a fattorino, or errand boy, into his studio in the summer of 1490. “Giacomo came to live with me on the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, 1490, aged 10 years,” he recorded. Giacomo’s full name was Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, but his unruly behaviour in Leonardo’s studio quickly earned him a nickname: Leonardo began calling him Salai, Tuscan slang for demon or devil. Things went wrong very quickly. “The second day I had two shirts cut out for him,” Leonardo wrote in a long letter of complaint to the boy’s father, “a pair of hose, and a jerkin, and when I put aside some money to pay for these things he stole four lire, the money out of the purse; and I could never make him confess, though I was quite certain of the fact.” The boy’s transgressions did not end there. On the following evening, Leonardo went to dinner with a friend, a distinguished architect, and Giacomo, invited to the table, made a memorable impression: “Giacomo supped for two and did mischief for four, for he broke three cruets and spilled the wine.” Leonardo vented his fury at the boy’s behaviour in the margin of the letter: “ladro, bugiardo, ostinato, ghiotto”—thief, liar, obstinate, glutton.

More was to come. Some weeks later, one of Leonardo’s assistants, Marco, discovered that a silverpoint drawing had gone missing along with some silver coins. Conducting a search of the premises, he found the money “hidden in the said Giacomo’s box.” No one was safe from Giacomo’s light-fingered predations. A few months on, early in 1491, Leonardo designed costumes of “wild men” for a pageant in honour of Lodovico Sforza’s wedding. Giacomo, who accompanied Leonardo to the costume fitting, spotted his chance as the men undressed to try on their outfits: “Giacomo went to the purse of one of them which lay on the bed with other clothes . . . and took out such money as was in it.”

What did Giacomo do with his ill-gotten gains? Like any other 10-year-old, he took himself off to the sweet shop. This we know from Leonardo’s aggrieved account of the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a Turkish hide for which Leonardo had paid two lire, and from which he was hoping to have a pair of boots made for himself. “Giacomo stole it of me within a month,” he wrote, “and sold it to a cobbler for 20 soldi, with which money, by his own confession, he bought aniseed candies.”

Despite all this, not only was Giacomo allowed to remain in the studio; the larcenous fattorino was clearly treated by Leonardo as a favourite. Indeed, Leonardo lavished gifts on him from the outset, making sure he was dressed, like his master, in beautiful clothing. In the first year alone, Giacomo’s wardrobe cost Leonardo 26 lire and 13 soldi, the annual wage of a domestic servant. These articles included an astonishing 24 pairs of shoes, as well as four pairs of hose, a cap, six shirts and three jerkins. Undated notes written sometime later recount how Leonardo bought Giacomo a chain and gave him money to purchase a sword and have his fortune told. “I paid to Salai three gold ducats,” reads another, “which he said he wanted for a pair of rose-coloured hose with their trimming.” Giacomo, like his master, evidently favoured pink tights. A week or two later, more purchases: “I gave Salai 21 braccia of cloth to make a shirt, at 10 soldi the braccio.” Thus, the material alone cost 210 soldi, or more than 10 lire—half the annual wage of a domestic servant.

Why this sticky-fingered little clothes horse managed to keep his place in the Corte dell’Arengo is fairly simple. Giacomo held a great physical attraction for Leonardo, who was bewitched by the boy’s appearance, especially his curly hair. According to Vasari, Salai was “a very attractive youth of unusual grace and looks, with very beautiful hair which he wore curled in ringlets and which delighted his master.” Giacomo seems to have served as a model for Leonardo. No definitive image of him exists, but art historians refer to a distinctive face that appears repeatedly in his drawings—that of a beautiful youth with a Greek nose, a mass of curls and a dreamy pout—as a “Salai-type profile.”

Alix Ohlin, 40, moved around a lot in her life before she came to rest two years ago as a professor of creative writing at Lafayette College in Easton, Penn. But she was born and bred in Montreal, the city that’s home to many of the characters in her novel Inside, shortlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize (and this year’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize). “I feel very rooted there, in a place so particular and vibrant,” she says in an interview. “Wherever I go, I always identify as a Montrealer.” The city, though, took a while to enter into Ohlin’s writing. In grad school, she was reluctant to set a story there, for fear her classmates, mostly American, wouldn’t understand the references. “I used a generic suburb instead, sort of like the one I grew up in, but it felt really wrong. One of the purposes of this novel was to go back to writing about Montreal in a way that felt truer to the memories I have of it, including the way people move back and forth between English and French.” But Inside is far from being a novel of place, Ohlin agrees. “There’s a line in it,” she points out, “that reads that some people are destined to leave a place and keep on leaving.” The book moves from Montreal to New York to Iqaluit to Los Angeles. And to Kigali in Rwanda—the one place in Inside where Ohlin herself has never been—during the 1994 genocide. In a story about therapists and patients, the latter scarcely more psychologically damaged than the former, the Rwanda section is, in some regards, the entire novel writ small. “The book is about rescue and the importance of attempting to help—whether or not the attempts succeed, they’re central to our humanity—and the Rwanda section was a way of writing that theme in an international way, to reflect and underscore how it unfolds in individual lives elsewhere in the novel.” Here is Alix Ohlin on reading (and writing), followed by an excerpt from Inside:

Prince Edward Island in the 1870s. A mansion on Long Island during the roaring twenties. Mars in the early years of colonization.

I’ve never been to any of these places, of course, but each of them feels like home to me. They were as much a part of my childhood as my actual house in Montreal, because they were the settings of books I loved. Anne of Green Gables, Jay Gatsby, the troubled explorers of The Martian Chronicles (to name just a few)—these people populated my universe, kept me company, made me laugh and cry. I’ve spent most of my life reading, blinking with confused surprise when I look up to discover that I’m sitting in a chair, somewhere in the 21st century.

Writing for me is first and foremost an act of gratitude toward the books that have shaped my life and helped me make sense of the world. It is a way of participating in an ageless conversation, across culture and time, about what it means to be alive. The writer Iris Murdoch once said that the subject of her work was “the otherness of other people,” and to me this has always rung true. Literature gives us access to the interior lives of people different from ourselves, no matter where or when they live, in their fascinating, mysterious, even frustrating complexity. It’s nothing short of miraculous.

When I first began writing, I would sometimes copy out, by hand, passages from books I particularly admired. I wanted to feel what it might have been like to build those sentences, clause by clause, word by word. I remember doing this with Herzog by Saul Bellow, a writer pretty remote from me in subject matter and style. It wasn’t that I wanted to write exactly like Bellow, or the other writers I chose. I was trying to catch the music of their language, to understand how it led to such wit and perception and depth of humanity. I do this less often now, but a friend recently reminded me of another book I love, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I went back and looked at the opening line: “In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.” I had to write it down, because it is so enigmatic and simple and sad. A sentence like that can break your heart: what an amazing thing for words on a page to do.

People sometimes ask me whether I get lonely, spending so much time by myself working. But I hardly ever do. I have all these books on my shelves, waiting to be read and reread. And I know that there are writers like me all around the world, hunched at their desks, each of them crafting singular, beautiful universes, telling stories about what it means to be alive.

Montreal, 1996

At first glance, she mistook him for something else. In the fading winter light he could have been a branch or a log, even a tire; in the many years she’d been cross-country skiing on Mount Royal, she’d found stranger debris across her path. People left behind their scarves, their shoes, their inhibitions: she’d come across lovers naked to the sky, even on cold days. In spite of these distractions, the mountain was the one place where she felt at peace, especially in winter, when tree branches stretched empty of leaves and she could see the city below her—its clusters of green-spired churches and gray skyscrapers laid out, graspable, streets rolling down to the Old Port, and in either direction the bridges extending over the pale water of the St. Lawrence. This winter had been mild, and what snow did fall first melted, then turned to ice overnight. Now, at the end of January, it had finally snowed all night and all day, at last enough to ski on. Luckily her final appointment that afternoon had cancelled, leaving her free to drive up before the light was gone. She slipped around the Chalet and headed into the woods, losing the vista of Montreal below, gaining muffled silence and solitude, the trees turning the light even fainter. One skier had been here before her, leaving a path of parallel stripes. On a slight downhill slope she crouched down and picked up speed as she moved around a bend.

Turning, she saw the branch or whatever it was too late. Though she tried to slow down, she wasn’t quick enough and ran right into it and was knocked out of her skis, falling sideways into the snow, realizing only when she sat up that what had tripped her was the body of a man. Her legs were on top of his, her right knee throbbing from the impact.

The air torn from her returned slowly, painfully, to her burning lungs. When she could breathe she said, “Are you all right?”

There was no answer. He was flung across the trail with his head half buried in the snow. Beyond his body the ski marks stopped. She thought he must have had an accident, but then she saw his skis propped neatly against a tree.

She got to her feet and gingerly stepped around until she could see his face. He wasn’t wearing a hat. “Excuse me,” she said, louder. “Are you okay?” She thought maybe he’d collapsed after a heart attack or stroke. He lay sprawled on his side, knees bent, eyes closed, one arm up above his head. “Monsieur?” she said. “Ça va?”

Kneeling down to check his pulse, she saw the rope around his neck. Thick and braided, it trailed beneath him, almost nestled under his arm, and the other end rested on a snowbank—no, was buried underneath it—and on the other side she could see that the branch it had been tied to had broken off.

She hurriedly loosened the rope and found the beating rhythm in his neck, then opened the first few snaps of his coat in the hope that this might help him to breathe. His face wasn’t blue. He was around her age, thirties, his short, wavy, brown hair riddled with gray. Still his eyes wouldn’t open. Should she slap him? Administer CPR? She pushed him gently onto his back. “Monsieur?” she said again. He didn’t move.

She skied quickly back to the Chalet and called 911. In her halting French, all the more fractured because she was out of breath, she tried to describe where in the woods they were. When she returned, he was lying where she’d found him. “Sir,” she said, “my name is Grace. Je m’appelle Grace. I called for help. Everything will be all right. Vous êtes sauvé.”

She put her ear next to his mouth to hear his breath. His eyes were still closed, but he heavily, unmistakably, sighed.

Later, at the Montreal General, she realized that both pairs of skis had been left behind. The emergency workers had loaded the man into the ambulance and she had followed it, weaving through the traffic along Côte-des-Neiges. She wasn’t even sure why. Because the Urgences-santé men had looked at her expectantly, assuming she and the man had been skiing together? Because one of them had said, in commingled English and French, “The police—ils vont vous poser des questions at the ’ospital,” and she had nodded obediently, like a schoolgirl?

It was partly curiosity, to know what had driven him to such an act; and partly pity, because anyone driven to hang himself would have to be suffering deeply and terribly. And it was partly that she of all people had been the one to throw herself across his path.

Canada’s most distinguished literary prize awards $50,000 annually to the best Canadian novel or short-story collection published in English

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-suicide-on-mount-royal/feed/0Deborah Ellis is a Breadwinner for Afghan womenhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-breadwinner-for-afghan-women/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/a-breadwinner-for-afghan-women/#commentsThu, 13 Sep 2012 09:00:01 +0000Brian Bethunehttp://www2.macleans.ca/?p=289719The Canadian author has given more than $1 million in royalties to charity

Back in 2000, when she first published The Breadwinner and dedicated the royalties from it to an Afghan women’s group, Canadian writer Deborah Ellis hoped, for its sake, the novel would earn back the entire $3,000 publisher’s advance. Today, after 9/11 and the shift of international focus to Afghanistan, The Breadwinner and its two sequels (Parvana’s Journey and Mud City) are one of the most famous trilogies in recent tween literature, and their royalties total more than $1 million. The money has all gone to causes dear to Ellis—mostly, via Canadian Women For Afghanistan, for girls’ education in the war-torn nation—although Mud City’s returns are dedicated to Street Kids International. “I don’t notice it going,” says Ellis, laughing, in an interview at Pomegranate, a Persian restaurant in Toronto. “It’s all whisked away before I see it, like an automatic savings plan.”

Ellis, 52, has now published 20 books, and even without the financial boost of her bestsellers, the Simcoe, Ont., author was able to leave her job as a mental health counsellor five years ago to become a full-time writer. But long before her writing career began, Ellis was passionately interested in what she calls “peace and justice” issues, from anti-war activism to women’s rights. They all coalesced in 1996 after the Taliban captured Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and gave free reign to misogyny. “Here I was,” says Ellis, “a woman in Canada, used to doing what I want, going where I want—I couldn’t imagine living under a government that restricted that because of my gender.”

Travelling on her savings, she went to an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan the next year, and again in 1999, and did what she could to help, which turned out to be recording the stories of the women in the camps. Ellis collected a depressingly familiar litany of war horrors, and a few stories specific to the Taliban’s rule: girls’ schools destroyed, women beaten for being out without male accompaniment, and young girls working dressed as boys, risking drastic retribution to bring home a little money or food. She put it all into The Breadwinner, about courageous 11-year-old Parvana, who assumes her dead brother’s place after her father is imprisoned in order to provide for her mother and sisters. The response, financially and critically, was massive, and Ellis can expect more of the same now that her iconic heroine is back in her newest novel, My Name is Parvana.

Now 15, Parvana is in the custody of American troops who found her in the ruins of a bombed-out school. She refuses, for reasons that slowly become apparent, to speak to the foreigners, despite days of mistreatment and threats. Instead she retreats within herself, enduring her detention by recalling the past four years of her life. “I was curious about Parvana and [her friend] Shauzia’s lives in post-9/11 Afghanistan,’ says Ellis, in the peculiar, living-beings way authors tend to talk about their characters. “And, of course, the children always ask me when I go into schools. So I thought I’d find out.”

My Name is Parvana is perhaps the most subtle and accomplished of the four Breadwinner volumes. There are striking scenes of contrast in Afghanistan, torn between Western troops and the Taliban. Parvana’s involvement in a girls’ school brings her more moments of real childhood happiness than most of her past life offered, before it brings catastrophes more painful than ever. “I think most people, no matter what their situation, manage to find joy and comfort in their daily lives,” says Ellis. “I also think things fall apart.”

Then there’s the way that, even while Parvana is being manhandled by American soldiers, her older sister wins a scholarship to a New York university. It’s a feat Nooria accomplishes, in part, by appropriating Parvana’s story of the risks she ran dressed as a boy—a tale that delights the scholarship administrators and infuriates Parvana, even as it mirrors what Ellis did with the collective memories of real Afghan girls. But Parvana eventually comes to accept what readers already know: Nooria’s ends, like Ellis’s before her, far outweigh the means.

Noreen Taylor, founder and chair of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, with this year's shortlisted books. (Tom Sandler/CP)

I was at the shortlist announcement for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction this morning. Our regular books writer, Brian Bethune, couldn’t make it, so I got to enjoy the fancy cookies and ogle the book types instead. I’ve always been a bit fascinated by the Charles Taylor Prize—and a little bit confused by it, too. Some of the winners have been very good over the years. (Ian Brown’s book, which won in 2010, was great.) But at the same time I’m never quite sure what they mean by “literary.”

Most years, the Taylor longlist is a big mix of biographies, popular works by academics and assorted Title-Colon-Subhead style memoirs (eg: Golden Forest: A Son’s Exploration of the West Coast Woodlands). There’s usually a lot of good work on interesting topics. But rarely does anything jump out as aggressively new. The focus always seems to be more on the subject than the form.

Partly, I think, this is because Canada doesn’t have the magazine culture the U.S. has. There just aren’t the venues here that compete to develop big feature writers that there are in the States. And, to my mind, anyway, that’s where great non-fiction comes from. The two best non-fiction books I read last year, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and The Possessed by Elif Batuman are both collections of, mostly, magazine work. (Sullivan’s in Harper’s, GQ and the Paris Review; Batuman’s in Harper’s, the New Yorker and N+1.)

Competition among the glossies and the literary magazines down south pushes young talent to do new, better work faster. It’s why a new star, like the New Yorker’s David Grann, or Canada’s own Chris Jones at Esquire, seems to pop up every few years. In Canada, even with the Taylor Prize and the lucrative new B.C. national prize, our nonfiction writers just aren’t playing in the same world. They aren’t working from the same kind of tradition, or with the same kind of editors, that produced a John McPhee or a Joan Didion or a David Foster Wallace.

None of this is meant to slight the prize or the books or even the many, many talented Canadian magazine writers out there. People are doing fascinating, wonderful non-fiction in Canada. I think giving them money and national press exposure is an unqualified good thing. But I can’t help wishing, every year when the list comes out, for something with a little more pop, something with a voice or a structure that makes me say: “That’s it. That’s the new thing.” (Obviously, I haven’t read everything out there. I’m no doubt missing a lot of great work.)

All that aside, what struck me about this year’s shortlist was how B.C.-centric it was. It’s tough to argue, after leaving a reception at a Bay Street Bank, that the centre of the Canadian literary world is tilting west. But there’s no doubt that in fiction and non-, B.C. is a power.

Consider today’s short-listed writers:

· JJ Lee, nominated for The Measure of a Man, is a Vancouver Sun columnist and CBC Vancouver commentator.

· Wade Davis, nominated for Into the Silence, is a B.C. native who splits his time between Vancouver and Washington, D.C.

· Madeline Sonik, Afflictions and Departures, wrote much of her book as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Victoria, where she now teaches.

· Andrew Westoll, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary, lives in Ontario, but has an MFA from the University of British Columbia.

I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about that fact. But some credit has to go to province’s two big writing schools, at UBC and UVic, not just for shaping authors like Westoll and Sonik (and 2011 Giller winner Esi Edugyan) but also for creating literary communities those cities now enjoy.